


where the gin is cold but the piano's hot

by gellavonhamster



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Don't copy to another site, F/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22532200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster
Summary: About a hundred years of crime, spying, and miscommunication, a condensed version.
Relationships: The Bomb/The Roach (The Folk of the Air)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	where the gin is cold but the piano's hot

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Где горячий твист и холодный джин](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22532080) by [gellavonhamster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster). 



> title taken from All That Jazz from the musical Chicago

The night he first sees her, jazz is playing – at least some kind of music he likes is playing, and he considers any decent human music to be jazz because the mortals haven’t invented any music better than jazz yet, and it’s unlikely they ever will. It’s hot and crowded at the club, and a smell of sweat and perfume is hanging in the air. The attention of those listening to music while seated at the tables is drawn to the band; the attention of those dancing is drawn to their partners, and no one notices a petite young woman stealthily pulling expensive cigarette-cases out of patrons’ pockets and taking ladies’ handbags off the backs of the chairs. No one but him. Van is in no hurry to approach her; there is no doubt she is the one he’s heard about, but first he has to make sure it pays to get involved with her. The only thing he can say about her so far is that she isn’t much of a thief. It is seen with the naked eye that she’s relying on glamour too much, and would hardly be able to snatch anything without it. 

It is later that she demonstrates her true talent, when one of the poor idiots notices his watch missing and makes a fuss. He and his buddies give chase to the thief, who makes a bolt for the back door, so Van leaves a couple of coins on the table quickly – because the music here is fine – and rushes after them. At the exit to the backyard, Van gets a chance to behold one of the stranger’s tricks that he’s been told about: a loud bang goes off, black smoke fills the doorway, and the mortals collapse, screaming and rubbing their eyes violently. All of them save for the owner of the watch, who’s already in the yard at that moment – and though he went down like a tree as well, he’s managed to seize the girl by the shoulders and drag her after him. Van would have watched her fight her chaser off – he’s almost sure she’d be able to do that – but there’s no time for that, so he decides to interfere, creeps up on the mortal, grabs the man’s shoulder, and digs into the pressure point with his claw. The mortal makes a gurgling sound and passes out. 

The first thing she attempts to do when Van offers her his hand to help her get up is to hit him.

“Hey, hey,” he says conciliatorily, holding up his hands. “I’m just trying to help, you know.”

She staggers to her feet, and smoothens down her dress reflexively.

“Who sent you?” she asks him, looking at him closely. Obviously, she can see his real appearance through the veil of glamour, just like he can see hers. She’s a pixie, though not a pure-blood, apparently. The little wings on her back tremble in sync with her uneven breathing. 

“No one. But I have matters to discuss with you. Come, let’s have a chat,” Van glances back. One of the robbed man’s pals tumbles out of the building, still squinting in pain. “And hurry up, would you?”

The bar he leads her to has worse music and simpler clientele, but they can catch their breath there, and talk everything through in peace. While he is describing the upcoming job to her (a local moneybags with no idea there were faeries in his bloodline, his great-grandmother’s charmed necklace, the people willing to pay a good round sum for that necklace), as well as what would be required from her (sleeping potions and explosives) and what she could get out of it (not more than fifteen per cent from what they were to pay him – that would be just fair), she listens to him with a light frown and fiddles with the thin bracelets on her thin wrist. She looks tired, distrustful – makes one think her life isn’t easy. Then again, would anyone with an easy life go stealing watches from restaurant revellers? She’s also outrageously pretty: a voluminous cloud of white hair; blue wings that look delicate, never mind if not too strong; warm brown skin with white spots like that of a doe; huge eloquent eyes. Van stumbles over his words twice while explaining her the proposed plan of the heist, and both times it’s because he gets carried away by the sight of her – in other words, both times because he’s a damn fool. 

“Twenty-five per cent at least,” she says in the end, having found out all the details of interest to her.

“Fifteen. At most.”

“Twenty-five, and you can saddle me with more work.”

“Fifteen, and all I need from you is to have my back with your firecrackers. No offense, darling, but you’re not that good as a thief.” 

“Twenty,” she’s toying with a fork someone has left on the table. “And don’t call me darling,” with that, she suddenly drives the fork into the tabletop within an inch of Van’s hand, and he flinches. 

It is worth it, because she smiles at him – smiles at him for the first time; a radiant, mischievous smile. Now that’s what her face has been made for, Van thinks absentmindedly. Not for anxiety, not for weariness, but for smiling. 

“Which one of these is charmed?” he asks, gesturing at her bracelets with a nod. “Or is it your earrings?”

She frowns again, and he thinks: did he really have to say that?

“There’s nothing charmed on me,” she tells him. “Why?”

Oh, Van thinks, so no trinkets that increase attractiveness. So it’s just that he hasn’t been with anyone for a while now. The only rational explanation. 

“I just thought there might be,” he replies offhandedly, and holds out his hand for a handshake before she can ask again – he cannot lie, after all. “All right, twenty it is. And how shall I call you then, by the way?”

“My name is Liliver,” she says and shakes his hand, and he feels like the wind has been knocked out of him and thinks: come on, you idiot, what are you, a boy? 

“Liliver,” he repeats. Her name jingles on his tongue. “I’m Van.”

“Well, Van, it’s nice to meet you,” she lets go of his hand and raises her glass. “Shall we drink to the beginning of our alliance?”

They stay at the bar for a long time, paying for drinks with enchanted shards of bottles, and by the end of the evening he’s almost sure he is far gone.

**

The necklace theft goes without a hitch, they get their gold, and in a few days Van contacts her again: he needs a partner for robbing a mortal antiquarian whose collection, unbeknownst to him, includes some merfolk weapons. 

“Bear in mind, it’s a long journey,” Van tells her as he sits down on the edge of the table in her workshop. Liliver makes her bombs in the attic of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Brooklyn. This is also where she sleeps, and though she has smartened the attic up as much as possible with the bought and stolen knick-knacks and paintings, she still cannot help thinking that this is not a place meant for living. Sometimes she dreams about the family manor and the bedroom with rhododendron shrubs outside the window – unfortunately, those dreams are usually nightmares. “We’ll have to fly.”

“Where?”

“Louisiana. Ever been there?”

“Now I will,” she shrugs, ready to go anywhere just not to stick here all the time. Liliver knows: she can run to Louisiana or to Australia or to the end of the world, but her sorrow will tag along loyally and dutifully. Still, at least this way she’ll take her mind off that, and make some money at the same time. Van just chuckles approvingly in response. 

After New Orleans (a dagger with its hilt carved to look like a mermaid’s tale; a party on a terrace of a huge house; the high-heeled shoes she threw into the ditch; the flight back on ragwort ponies, making stops in the fields and forests and dying hick towns), they don’t see one another for almost half a year. Liliver doesn’t try to look for him: firstly, she’s got things to do as it is, and secondly, she is inexplicably sure that one day he’ll come to her himself. And so he does, with a bottle of bathtub gin and a new brilliant plan that he cannot put into action without her help. 

Some more time after that, they start working together on a regular basis, stealing from humans and faeries alike. Van teaches her to move more nimbly, makes her practice on him, having her pilfer at least one object from his pockets per day. For her part, Liliver gives up on trying to make an assistant out of him after he almost blows up both of them by accident – not that she really is in need of a helper anyway. Together they break into houses, pick locks, crack safes, together they appear in the restaurants, movie theatres, and at the races. Every so often their business brings them to Faerie, and Liviver is surprised to discover that she is able to be there again after all she’s gone through, able to breathe without hearing the cries that her loved ones died with each and every second – it appears that time is a good healer indeed. 

Usually she ensures the routes of escape or cleans out the victims’ pockets while Van distracts them with smooth talk. He has a way with words – in most cases he does not even need glamour to pitch a line to humans and even faeries. Though when it comes to mortals, a goblin and a pixie certainly cannot do without magic – after all, they cannot show their true faces to them. Especially Van, who is no oil painting even compared to some of his fellow goblins. 

In spite of that, eventually she must admit she’s head over heels for him.

Of course, part of the reason must be that before he came into her life, Liliver was lonely. Her entire family had been slaughtered; all of her friends either died or turned out to be traitors. Her new life in the mortal world was rather survival than life, a row of endeavours to make a living, not get into trouble, kill time, and not go insane from grief. She didn’t bond with any other faeries she has crossed paths with, first for fear of getting stabbed in the back again, and then for fear of having lost the ability to socialize, make friends, love. Then she met Van and was surprised to find out she was still able to trust somebody – and to laugh. Is it possible to fall for someone just because when you’re with them, you can laugh, listen to other’s stories and tell your own, tease and rib each other? Is it enough just to feel alive next to someone – and is there any need for anything else, really? 

With him, it’s easy – but it all becomes ineffably difficult as soon as it comes to giving him a clue about her feelings. Liliver knows she’s good-looking, knows that she has the ability to win others’ affection; still, she’s afraid of using these weapons of hers lest she ruin the friendship she still needs so much. He’s not much older than she is, yet something in this ridiculous awkward affair reminds her of her youth and her crush on the sprite her parents had hired to teach her and her sisters sword-fighting: it’s the same overwhelming affection, blushing and smiling stupidly at the memories of accidental touches, the same certainty that if she tries to make a step forward, nothing good will come out of it. The same fear of being laughed at. 

He does not laugh – he simply either does not understand or ignores all her careful attempts at flirting. There is no telling if it’s the former or the latter. She’s afraid to learn the truth, so she doesn’t ask.

At some point Liliver gives up and agrees to go on a date with the sylph who shops for potion ingredients at the same place as she does. A month later she dumps him, and the same evening she sleeps with a nixie that lives in the city canal. The succession of relationships in her life becomes almost continuous. The faces on the pillow next to her in the mornings keep replacing one another.

Her feelings for Van do not disappear, but as the years go by, she gets used to them, and cannot imagine herself without that bright sweet sadness, just like without the wings on her back. 

On a hot day in June 1968 by the human chronology, she and Van sit on a rock near Grand Canyon and drink mead. 

“Are you seriously planning to steal from the Court of Teeth?” Liliver asks him, holding up her face to the scorching sun. 

Van shrugs. “You think we can’t handle it? _We?_ ”

It ends up being the only time when they can’t handle it.

**

The Court of Teeth turns them into its marionettes, and it is his fault. Shouldn’t have tried to bite more than he could chew, some nuts are too tough to crack, and so on, and so forth. Van could have regarded it as a sort of justice – not that it would have stopped him from trying to escape captivity by any possible means – if Liliver hadn’t been caught too. They tortured her, subjected her to the same geases and curses as him, enslaved her – and it is his fault. 

Their lives are spared because they’re useful. His sleight of hand and talent for thievery, her profound knowledge of potion- and bomb-making. Their lives are spared – but now these lives are pitch-black and hopeless, with no room for rest, for respect, for freedom. The work they’re being assigned makes his skin crawl, and he’s seen quite a lot in his lifetime. He is a thief and a crook, but he has never been a murderer – before. He’s killed when there was no other way to get out alive, sure, but not deliberately, not frequently, and without excessive violence. He used to have at least some kind of moral compass. Now he can’t afford it anymore. 

He could have let that shit consume him completely, but he keeps holding on – for Liliver. Liliver, who could have grown to hate him, for it was his overconfidence that has doomed them for a life in the service of one of the most bloodthirsty Courts – but she hadn’t, she keeps talking to him, keeps sharing healing ointments with him and even applying them herself to the fresh scars on his face. He used to be quite a scarecrow by the standards of most Faerie folk even before, and now it’s way worse. But she does not look away, does not wince, she touches his wounds ever so carefully and they heal a little faster under the influence of the potions and under her fingers, and his pain is almost worth these touches. 

At times, Van lets himself imagine another life, a life in which she hasn’t become a slave through his fault, a life in which he doesn’t look like a freak next to her lovely self, a life in which he could let himself confess his feelings to Liliver and stand a chance of having them returned. At times, but not too often. Dreams are fine stuff, but one can’t live in them forever. 

And he has to go on living and looking for a way to win back freedom for himself and for the woman he loves – the more so for her.

“Tell me something,” Liliver asks him sometimes at night, crawling up closer to him on the stone floor, so he tells her whatever he can remember: tales of kings and heroes, seers and warriors, priests and knights. Tales with happy endings, because they get enough of the opposite of that on daily basis. Crooks are well-versed in pretty stories. 

At night, she presses her cheek to his shoulder and laces her fingers with his when he takes her hand – because she’s cold and miserable and wants to hold on with all her strength to whoever’s beside her, even to someone like him.

Sometimes in his sleep he feels a tender fleeting touch of her lips on his cheek or his brow and does not open his eyes, for he knows that it could be nothing but a dream. 

**

After the Court of Teeth, working for Prince Dain seems like a fairy tale. At first Liliver cannot shake off the thought that in a moment she’s going to wake up and find herself in a musty little room in the dungeons, her back aching after a night spent on cold stone, her fingers still gripping Van’s clawed hand so hard they’ve gotten numb. Every morning she wakes up with relief – and a little bit of regret, because she misses his warmth close to her body, his steady breath. Both of them have their own rooms now – a far cry from the royal chambers, most certainly, but good enough for her. Admittedly, she has long come to accept that even if she gave him a hint that she wouldn’t mind him spending a night in her room, he would say nothing and pretend he didn’t understand. She misses his stories and his songs and his attempts to reassure her with promises that one day they’ll get out of that nightmare, but why in the world would he continue to regale her with all that if the nightmare really is over? He must be just happy to take a break from her constant presence. 

They are still close, still exchange the jokes only the two of them understand, still get drinks together evenings, but Liliver feels like something has become history beyond recall. It might be because now that they’re spies, the unseen and faceless gears in the machinery of court intrigue, each day they become less of Van and Liliver and more of the Roach and the Bomb. What use do shadows have for names? What use for feelings and memories? It also might be because they’ve spent so many years working in pair but now they’ve found themselves a part of a trio. Their associate, a young half-blood faerie who goes by the Ghost, is friendly and reliable enough but secretive as well, and even though it doesn’t take too long for Liliver to stop feeling wary of him, it still isn’t quite the same as the life she and Van used to live in the lands of humans, back when it was two of them against the world. 

Now there are three of them: three spies of the Court of Shadows, three cards up Prince Dain’s sleeve. A king, a queen, and a knave. When Jude Duarte, their little Queen of Shadows, joins them, there is finally an ace in this deck. 

Soon after, there is a coup, Dain’s death, his father and sisters’ deaths, and then young Cardan is on the throne, and Jude is his seneschal, standing beside his throne and only officially not on the throne herself. And then she and Jude are examining the chambers of the late King Eldred, checking if it will be safe for Cardan here, if he should still watch out for assassins hiding in secret passages. And then she, Liliver, the last survivor of her family, a thief, a spy, and a former servant of the Court of Teeth, is lounging on the huge bed of the deceased monarch just because she can. 

Anything comes true; anything but the dearest wishes.

Jude and she laugh like children, sprawled across the pillows, and Liliver, for once in a while, remembers her little sisters – the way they used to climb into each other’s beds just like that and share secrets, not the way blood flowed from their slit throats. 

The secret Jude elicits from her is both a long-held one and one that is too fresh, like a non-healing would. 

“You should tell him,” Jude suggests as if she has any right to give such advice, as if there is nothing unhealthy and incendiary going on between her and the young king, nothing that causes suffering to both of them.

“Perhaps,” Liliver agrees.

She cannot promise she’ll do that because, like any faerie, she cannot lie.

**

His hands are shaking a little while he wipes his neck and his face with a cool damp cloth, but he feels strength coming back to him, filling his veins anew. He is still not as vigorous as before the poison dart hit him, but with each breath he takes he’s a little stronger than a moment ago. While he is cleaning up, Liliver sits on his bed and tells him what has happened while he was unconscious – about Jude’s return and how she healed him, about Madoc’s alliance with the Court of Teeth – that blasted Court of Teeth again! About the Ghost, who apparently can be trusted again. About Cardan turned into a giant serpent, which feels even more disheartening than the fact that they’re on the brink of war: Van has really taken to this boy, so spoiled and unloved at the same time. 

“So it means there’s no way to save him?” he asks, and sits down on the bed next to Liliver.

“I had nearly started thinking there was no way to save _you_. I didn’t want to believe that,” she smiles sadly, “yet still I couldn’t help thinking about that. And then Jude rescued you. She still hasn’t succeeded in bringing Cardan back, but now I’d rather believe that she just has to figure out how to do it than that she doesn’t have enough power for that.”

He thinks of Jude, whom he hasn’t seen yet since he came round, and smiles, too. He’d have to thank her: mortals must consider that appropriate.

“A mortal High Queen,” he chuckles, shaking his head. “We guessed it right with her code name, didn’t we? Our girl is the real ruler of Faerie.”

Liliver grins. “I know, right?”

She still has the same smile as many years ago, and she still seems made for merriment, for joy, but now he can press his lips to that smile, and now he knows that, as it turns out, he could have well done that ages ago.

“You know that you owe me, right? For all those years,” she whispers gleefully and kisses him on the lips, on the forehead, on the neck. Maybe back then, in the dungeons of the Court of Teeth, it was not a dream.

“My dear,” he replies, holding her closer, “Just like you do owe me.”

Now all that remains to be done is to win a war.

**

The night she first sees him, jazz is playing – at least some kind of music she likes is playing, and the only genre of human music she knows is jazz, though she likes the twenty-first century songs from the player that Vivienne Duarte got her just as well.

“Sounds romantic,” the High Queen remarks when Liliver tells her about that.

“Not romantic enough if I hadn’t tried to kill him even once, right, Your Majesty?”

“Hey, you tried to stab me with a fork the very first time we met,” Van points out.

“And I’ll try again if I have to,” she waves him away, and kisses him. 


End file.
